The Left Side of Normal Airplanes, The Internet, and Everything Else

For the last decade (11 years, actually) I've operated a DNS service called DtDNS.  It's been a wonderful side business which contributes a not insignificant portion of my family's income.  Over the last few years I've been occupied with other projects, school, and everything else.  I felt that I was getting too many phone calls from people who, quite simply, had no clue what they were doing and I removed the phone number from most places on the site.  I haven't paid much attention to the merchant account statements and the fees I've been paying.  I've been a little more lax than I should about responding to sales and support requests (though I do make urgent support requests a priority).  There is a very loyal customer base that sticks with the service, some for many years (thank you!).  The service, however, has begun to show the level of attention I give it.  Sales have slowed down and the renewal rate has slipped somewhat.  The icing on the cake was the massive denial of service attack which came blowing in like a hurricane a couple of weeks ago.  It not only knocked out most of the DNS service but actually impacted two of the three locations where the servers are housed (yikes!).  Fortunately only a few customers were actually impacted by the attack.  Most would have never known if we didn't send out a notice about it.

The attack did serve as a sort of wake-up call for me though.  I've taken the system for granted the last few years, and I need to put a stop to that.  Even with everything else going on, my customers and the service as a whole deserves more regular attention.  I've put the phone number back on every page of the site and will once again welcome calls with questions as needed.  I've even ordered a toll-free number to have forwarded to my cell phone so nobody has to worry about long distance fees (that will be active within a few days).  I've re-activated my advertising campaigns with Google and Adbrite with full conversion tracking.  I'll have to spend some money on the advertising to bring in some new users and get revenues back up to where they were a few years ago.  I've asked my customers to refer their friends as well.

To top it all off, I'm planning to update the website design early next year (there is just too much else going on this year between classes, work, other projects, and getting married in November).  The design won't be revolutionary, but evolutionary.  I plan to take the existing layout and widen it to better support larger screens.  I'll be making use of JQuery in a number of places to enhance the user experience, but keep the site compatible with browsers that do not support JavaScript (one of the big features of the current site and a must for some users).  The navigation will be reworked to be easier to use and deprecated options (such as whois) will be removed entirely.  I'm also planning some new tools and monitoring features which will make management easier.  On the back-end, I'm planning to build out a fully functional administrative console for the first time (I've always managed DtDNS directly from the database).  This will make support easier and faster going forward and allow me to handle support from just about anywhere.

At the same time I do have other projects in the works as well as classes to study for, so it will be a challenge to juggle everything.  I feel that putting some time into DtDNS is the right thing to do for the long-term, however, so that it can continue to work well for my customers and my family.  If anyone has ideas or suggestions for the new website, or ways I can make DtDNS better, please let me know.  Thanks!

I received a question today through my Sarasota Web Guy Q&A site today that I thought I would share with everyone.  It's a question related to DNS and how IP addresses are published, so I can only assume this came from a DtDNS user:

"Hi Justin, Question: I want to assign an 'A' record to point not only to a specific IP address but also to a specific port number 'xx' (i.e., 000.000.000.000:xx).  Is this possible?  Cheers, Rick"

Well Rick, there are two parts to the answer.  The first is that DNS only translates names to IP addresses.  It has no concept of ports.  The client software (a web browser, for example), will ask the operating system's stub DNS resolver what IP goes with the name the user entered.  It begins the lookup process until an authoritative DNS server for the name entered gives back a response (or it may use a previously cached response).  Once the stub resolver has this information, it passes the resulting IP address back to the client software.

The port that is used to connect isn't related to DNS, so the client software will either use a default port (80 or 443 in the case of a web browser, 21 for FTP, etc.) or a custom port supplied by a user.  Since DNS doesn't involve ports, you cannot append a port number to the IP address in the DNS records like you're asking about.

However, many people want to run web servers on their home connection, but the provider has likely blocked port 80 for incoming connections.  There are a couple of ways around this.  The first is to ensure that anyone linking to your site includes an alternate port (that you have configured your server to listen on) in the URL.  This would cause the web browser of visitors to use a custom port instead of the default port.  This would be in the format:

http://www.example.com:8888/some-file.html

The 8888 in this example would be replaced with your alternate port number.  If you're using DtDNS, you can use the "offline" feature in conjunction with a URL redirector to direct visitors to an alternate domain or hostname with the custom port number included as part of the redirection.  The DtDNS FAQ covers this in more detail.  I don't recommend doing this for any sort of mission-critical or public website, but it's an ok workaround for accessing a personal server at home if your provider blocks port 80.

I hope this information helps, but feel free to ask additional questions at Sarasota Web Guy and I'll try my best to give a clear answer.  Thanks!